Empowerment Women Civic Engagement and Public Freedoms

SVF is currently implementing a program “Empowerment Women Civic Engagement and Public Freedoms” in cooperation with WWDP. SVF aims at empowering women civic participation in public policies and freedoms. It also aims at promoting women free of expression and rights by activating a grassroots network and implementing a number of capacity building, awareness, social audit, monitoring, advocacy and media activities. To doing so, SVF will empower women leaders from different areas of social and political sciences, development, journalism, public relations, media aged 18-24 years old. SVF will empower them on principles and techniques of civic participation, monitoring, advocacy, information technology, transparency, accountability and legislation. Technically, SVF will coordinate with five women CBOs from different areas to empower the target groups practice their newly acquired skills by forming women grassroots forums. The forums will lead participant women to conduct public advocacy campaigns to improve their civic engagement in public policies at all levels.
SVF would like to see the power of women leaders’ contribution to improving the situations of their targeted groups on the concept and practices of free of expression and public freedoms. Women would contribute actively to promote society’s values and practices of respecting empowering women’s equal social and political participation at all levels. Women would put into practice their new skills and knowledge of empowerment women social and political participation. Women would elect their representatives in different positions in social and political life. They would contribute to improve the social delivery of local organisations from gender and social accountability perspectives. Young women leaders would have a worthwhile opportunity to empower their political practices through community work and participating in social accountability campaigns.
These activities will provide a real indication of changes happened on the lives of group young women leaders who empowered in techniques of leadership capacities with emphasis on free of expression, community voluntary work and elimination all forms of discrimination against women. The Palestinian society in Gaza Strip and the West Bank has been living in very serve circumstances and lack of human security at all levels due to the absence of peace process, economic development and the Palestinian division. Therefore, Palestinian women have witnessed these days unprecedented state of poor public freedoms, socio-political deadlock at all levels due to the paralyzed political system, social and geographic division and hardship economic life. The whelming majority of women aged 18-24 years old in Gaza Strip and the West Bank including Jerusalem and area C is jobless and suffering from high level of poverty, and lack of opportunities. Women also suffer from ineffective, inefficient and insufficient policies in the public life, which have already made their lives in a worse situation. Women have been practically misused by the politicians to achieve very narrow political interests regardless good governance practices, active grassroots engagement and community participation. Women have no real influences over the public policies and record a very low of civic participation. Women who call for change, improving human rights, democracy and peace building would face a number of social and political threats. They are banned from freedom of expression, freedom of media, the right of associations, and the right to organize peaceful actions and marches.